Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Other than the hurricane, the earthquake and the tsunami warnings, Hawaii was wonderful. Pictures are to come.

I wish I had more time to write, but the semester has descended--and I have a new job. In addition to teaching two creative writing classes, I am co-directing the university's Center for Literary Arts (CLA). We bring writers from all over the world to speak to the university and community.

This is a last-minute appointment, so the hurricane has traveled to the mainland.

Friday, August 10, 2007

For those who've been asking, she's the one who drew the picture of me at the top of my blog. (She's also my partner of 14 years.)

She creates these wonderful, expressive portraits with the drawing technique called modified blind contours. This means she doesn't look at the paper while her pen is moving. (Of course she looks later while she colors the drawings with Prismacolors or watercolors.)

She also has a new blog. In it, she intends to talk about teaching art to high schoolers--about creativity, education and being a lesbian teacher. Go over and say hi.

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Quote of the day, by Francince Prose: "No matter what a novel is about, it's finally about the individual and the complexity of human beings and humanity."

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As I wrote about at the end of this entry, I'm on my way to Hawaii, so this blog will be on hiatus until August 21. Aloha!

Tuesday, August 7, 2007

Green BuddhasOn the fruit stand.We eat the smileAnd spit out the teeth.

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Late September

The mail truck goes down the coastCarrying a single letter.At the end of a long pierThe bored seagull lifts a leg now and thenAnd forgets to put it down.There is a menace in the airOf tragedies in the making.

Last night you thought you heard televisionIn the house next door.You were sure it was some newHorror they were reporting,So you went out to find out.Barefoot, wearing just shorts.It was only the sea sounding wearyAfter so many lifetimesOf pretending to be rushing off somewhereAnd never getting anywhere.

This morning, it felt like Sunday.The heavens did their partBy casting no shadow along the boardwalkOr the row of vacant cottages,Among them a small churchWith a dozen gray tombstones huddled closeAs if they, too, had the shivers.

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(While Simic isn't a bad choice, next time, how about a woman and/or a person of color? Look at this timeline and you'll see--ta dah--mostly white men.)

Hawaii has always meant a lot to my mom. She worked as a nurse there in the mid 1950's, before it was a state. As a girl, she'd dreampt about working on Molokai with the lepers, ala Father Damien. She never did that, but she did have a chance to visit there several times.

And now as I go through boxes of things from my parents' house, I'm finding a lot she wrote about Hawaii. Over the years, she and my father went there often. She especially loved Kona.

I'm hoping she'll be able to share memories with us on the trip. At the very least, she will be able to smell, feel and taste the places she's always loved.

Monday, August 6, 2007

If you've never imagined sleeping with a poetry book under your pillow to become tenderly infused by another poet's power, welcome to the extraordinary world of Cecilia Woloch.

I'm thrilled to feature Cecila today. Highlighted are two of her stunning poems--"Bareback Pantoum" and "Why I Believed, As A Child, That People Had Sex in Bathrooms"--as well as her thoughts about the genesis of these poems. (I feel especially connected today to the "Why I Believed" poem, given my father's recent death and my mother's starting a new life in the midst of her Alzheimer's diagnosis. In clearing out their house this weekend because it just sold, I've come across so many things--notes, cards, pictures, writings--that have helped me see more deeply the intimate connection of their life together.)

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About why and how she began writing poetry, Cecilia says she has been "in love with language, and especially musical language" for as long as she can remember, She was "good at memorizing and reciting poems as a kid" and started making her first attempts at writing poetry in early adolescence.

Theater has also influenced her. She says, "I was also a pretty good comic and character actor on stage in college and for a few years after, in equity-waiver theater; my attraction to acting had mostly to do with language, too, with wanting to say things in intense and beautiful ways, wanting to move exceptional language out into the world."

Cecilia describes herself as "catholic" in her poetry tastes. She says, "I try to keep an open mind and an open heart, and to let things move me and stimulate me in all kinds of ways." Her poetic influences include Anna Akhmatova, who "has been very important to me—her life as well as her work, the lessons they offer about integrity and beauty and love. I slept with her collected poems under my pillow during one of the most difficult periods of my life, and even dreamt of her, and felt I drew strength from that. She'd lived through worse, and when asked if she could describe it, gave that miraculous answer, Yes, I can. Her example is a gift to all of us."

Cecilia has a similar relationship with the poet H.D., whom Cecilia believes has been underrated. H.D. "wrote, in my opinion, her most beautiful poems and some of the most beautiful poems in the language while the bombs were falling around her during the London blitz. Her 'Trilogy,' in my opinion, makes Eliot's 'Wasteland' look like a long, incoherent whine. I think she was and is too easily dismissed by the male poetry establishment."

As far as contemporary poets, Cecelia admires the work of Sharon Doubiago. Doubiago's "work and life have provided important examples to me, too, and another woman poet whose work doesn't get the attention I feel it deserves. Her book Hard Country changed my life, and my way of seeing the world, and my attitude toward poetry."

Cecilia adds, "Of course there are male poets, too, whose work I love and admire. W.S. Merwin—also an example of extraordinary artistic and personal integrity, I think. And Walt Whitman, whose work I return to again and again, for its energy and wild love. And where would any of us be without Rilke, and Lorca, and Langston Hughes, and their vision of humanity? And I love the shattered beauty of Saphho's fragments, especially Anne Carson's versions of them, and I think Anne Carson is truly a genius, though I seldom use that word to describe anyone."

Cecilia clearly has a reverence for the echoes of individual lives. Embedded in her discussion of the term "genius," she added that she'd used the term to describe her nephew: "Jesse was killed in a car accident this past April, and I'm loathe to take the reference to him out of this response."

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Poem #1: "Bareback Pantoum"

Cecilia says:This poem began as a catalogue of images from a memory of one night in the heat of my adolescence, in rural Kentucky. Someone had started a fire in the woods near our house, probably to burn some brush or scrap lumber from a house that was being built nearby, and the fire started to spread. Since the fire department wouldn't come out unless or until a structure had caught fire, my sister and I and two local boys — Boo and Tony were their names — decided to take it upon ourselves to keep watch through the night. Boo and Tony had borrowed some horses from another neighbor, but we didn't have saddles. Really, it was just an excuse for my sister and me to ride bareback behind those boys through the woods, holding onto their waists, and my mother knew it. She and my father kept watch from the house, I'm sure, but let us stay out there until nearly dawn. My mother had to write a note to excuse my absence from school the next day, and wrote a melodramatic and hilarious account of the whole episode, which I wish I'd saved; it's probably better and more accurate than the poem. When I started to write the poem, 30-some years after the event, I wanted to capture the heart-galloping excitement I'd felt that night, the first stirrings of sexual drama; I wanted to try to write my own version of "The Highwayman," which I've loved since I was a girl and was first seduced by its dark rhythms. When the poem wasn't moving forward as a catalogue, I decided to try taking the most rhythmic lines and shaping a pantoum from those. The poem seemed to come together pretty easily after that; the pattern of repetition seemed to fit perfectly my memory of riding back and forth between the woods and our house, and was deeply pleasurable, too. It was the first pantoum I'd ever written, and I felt as if I'd discovered a slightly wicked, lovely secret.

Poem #2: "Why I Believed, As A Child, That People Had Sex in Bathrooms"

Cecilia says:This was a subject I'd thought about for years, though I never expected it, really, to be the subject of a poem. That "devil" in our bathroom door when I was a kid; the fact that I always made myself right at home in my parents' bed, and that the bathroom was a private place for my parents, and that, like most kids, I had my own theories about how the world of grown-ups worked. Of course, I realized at some point -- probably before I started to write the poem -- that my parents may indeed have had sex in the bathroom. But I wrote the first draft of this poem in one long sitting, one big rush, just piling up details and listing the reasons I thought this, thinking it was a kind of funny and silly thing to be writing, and then the last lines came as a real surprise, which is what I always hope will happen when I sit down to write. I think those last three lines are really a kind of manifesto of what my parents taught me -- or didn't teach me -- about sexual love. I usually write many drafts of a poem before I feel finished with it, but this one I only polished a little, deciding it was one of those "gifts" we sometimes get. * * *WHY I BELIEVED, AS A CHILD, THAT PEOPLE HAD SEX IN BATHROOMS

Because they loved one another, I guessed.Because they had seven kids and there wasn’ta door in that house that was ever locked —except for the bathroom door, that doorwith the devil’s face, two horns like flameflaring up in the grain of the wood(or did we only imagine that shape?)which meant the devil could watch you pee,the devil could see you naked.Because that’s where people took off their clothesand you had to undress for sex, I’d heard,whatever sex was — lots of kissing and other stuffI wasn’t sure I wanted to know.Because at night, when I was scared, I justclimbed into my parents’ bed. Sometimesother kids were there, too, and we sleptin a tangle of sheets and bodies, breath;a full ashtray on the nightstand; our father’swork clothes hung over a chair; our mother’sdamp cotton nightgown twisted around her legs.Because when I heard babies were made from sexand sex was something that happened in bed,I thought: No, the babies are already therein the bed. And more babies came.Because the only door that was ever lockedwas the bathroom door — those two insidein the steam of his bath, her hairspray’s mist,because sometimes I knocked and was let in.And my father lay in the tub, his whole dark bodyunder water, like some beautiful statue I’d seen.And my mother stood at the mirror, fixing her hair,or she’d put down the lid of the toiletand perched there, talking to him.Because maybe this was their refuge from us —though they never tried to keep us away.Because my mother told me oncethat every time they came home from the hospitalwith a brand new baby, they laughedand fell in love all over againand couldn’t wait to start making more.Should this have confused me? It did not.Because I saw how he kissed the back of her neckand pulled her, giggling, into his lap;how she tucked her chin and looked up at himthrough her eyelashes, smiling, sly.So I reasoned whatever sex they had, they hadin the bathroom — those steamy hourswhen we heard them singing to one anotherthen whispering, and the door stayed locked.Because I can still picture them, languid, there,and beautiful and young — though I had no ideahow young they were — my mothersoaping my father’s back; her dark hairslipping out of its pins.Because what was sex, after that? I didn’t knowhe would ever die, this god in a body, strong as god,or that she would one day hang her headover the bathroom sink to weep. I was a child,only one of their children. Love was clean.Babies came from singing. The devil was woodand had no eyes.

— Cecilia Woloch

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About Cecilia Woloch:Ceclia was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and grew up there and in rural Kentucky, the second of seven children of a homemaker and an airplane mechanic. Her mother came from a large, close-knit Polish-American family, and her father's people -- always very secretive and mysterious -- came from a place she'd only ever heard identified as "the Carpathians." She attended Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, and earned degrees in English and Theater Arts before moving to Los Angeles in 1979. From 1986 until 2006, she supported herself as a free-lance teacher of poetry and creative writing, leading workshops for children and young people in public schools, as well as workshops for teachers, professional writers, participants in Elderhostel programs for senior citizens, inmates at a prison for the criminally insane, and residents of a shelter for homeless women. During that time, she also spent several months each year "on the road" in Europe, especially in Paris and in the area of the Carpathians where her paternal grandmother was born.

She has published three books of poems: Sacrifice(Cahuenga Press, 1997); Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem; (Cahuenga Press, 2002) and Late(BOA Editions, 2003). A chapbook, "Narcissus" will be published by Tupelo Press in 2007. She's currently a lecturer in the creative writing program at the University of Southern California as well as a member of the core faculty of the low-residency MFA Program in Professional Writing at Western Connecticut State University, and she is the founding director of Summer Poetry in Idyllwild and of The Paris Poetry Workshop. Though her "base" is in Los Angeles, she continues to travel as much as possible, and feels most at home in Paris and in the Carpathians.

In June 2013, my husband and I set out to explore the world. I am blogging about our adventures. The author of five books, I taught university-level writing for many years, and now I'm a writing coach and book editor.

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